Entering the Speed Force is like drowning.

When Cisco lets go, Barry feels the surface drop out of his world, plunged underneath the surf. The water does not churn or stir or resist him. It entombs.

He reaches out for something to hold onto, to stop falling, but there isn't anything to grab. He wasn't lying when he said it was like being in space. There is no tether for him to hold onto. He drifts relentlessly down, towards an infinity he will never reach, and he wonders how long his sanity will permit him to anguish over the fall.

It's a fate worse than death and he hasn't taken a single step.

It's not a test or game or show of power. It is simply one version of reality. Life is endless motion, he thinks.

When he is starving for breath and release, his world flickers, and then a storm materializes.

Head spinning, he hears thunder crackle menacingly. A howling wind like a blizzard crowds his senses, whiting out his focus. His eyes adjust to a world that is dark and painted in hadean shades of bronze. A burnishing, broken light illuminates the room in odd places, a universe without a sun.

He feels the hairs on the back of his neck rise.

The sense of helplessness and ignorance aches in his chest. He has no control here. He was not born here; he was not meant to be here. He is an intruder, venturing to a corner of the universe with a lock never meant to be opened. He's breaking a lot of rules. And he knows he isn't going to get away with it.

A soft drizzling rain patters across the windows and he turns towards the sound. Morbid curiosity compels him to approach. What's it like to stand in a Speed-storm, he wonders, to feel its rain on his skin? He itches to open a window and find out.

Breathing shallowly, he nears. It's surreal to stand in the Speed Force and need to breathe. The last time he was here, he wasn't human. He was Speed and the idea of human. The particle accelerator explosion destroyed every vestige of Barry Allen. Speed Force gave him back that which the multiverse had taken away.

This time, he carries more weight. He carries with him a warning. I came from without.

Without the Speed Force's protection, he feels achingly vulnerable, like even the rain could kill him.

A door clangs and he turns sharply towards it. He edges back into a corner, aching to hide under a desk. It's a childish impulse that doesn't die when he steps forward instead.

I can come back to the rain, he tells himself. It's a security blanket, a tantalizing hint of normalcy. I can come back to the rain.

He exits the forensics lab and feels a chill overtake him, aware that he will never visit it again. Life is endless motion. It drives him forward where he would dwell, forcing him to take the next breath when he would savor the one before it.

I can't go back, he thinks.

Letting his footprints fade in the dust behind him, he descends the staircase into Speed Force's inferno.

. o .

The handrail glides soothingly under his palm.

Hey, sport, his dad says, open arms, and he rushes into them. Eleven years old, he didn't – couldn't – know that he would only get nineteen more of his father's hugs. You're okay, son.I've got you.

It is easier to tear his fascination from the rain than it is to let go of the railing, but he reaches the last stair and takes a step farther, and lets it go.

Life is endless motion.

. o .

The waking contradiction to his mantra arrives in the form of Eddie Thawne.

I can't move on, Eddie reminds him. My life is over.

Yet here he is, refusing to let Barry go.

Then a gun goes off.

Pain crackles, supernovic, near Barry's shoulder. He grits his teeth, holding his ground. It's imagined, he tells himself.

It's based in reality, a cerebral wrath reminds.

Savitar's claw broke through six inches of flesh and bone before it lodged deep within his shoulder. He can still feel it, and scarcely-mended bone aches and splinters and screams.

Looking at Eddie, Barry resists the urge to snarl.

I didn't let Savitar stop me.I won't let you, either.

. o .

Eddie tells him that he is free to go on one condition and Barry knows before he even turns what is waiting for him.

Last time he was here, he chased The Flash, The Ghost, across the Speed landscape.

This time, the ghost chases him.

. o .

In desperation, he phases through the time wraith.

He feels a sickening crush of pain in his right shoulder, a suffocating, clawing discomfort in his lungs, and an impending sense of doom that pushes him, back to the wall, in the elevator. He jabs the door close button relentlessly and the time wraith shrieks and closes in. Just before it can grab him, the doors slide shut.

Barry slides to the floor and shakes, hugging his knees to his chest.

God-he-doesn't-want-to-die.

. o .

When he was young, he would curl up between his parents in their bed just big enough for three. Being there, he would be able to sleep. It was simple: his parents were strong and they could protect him from anything.

They can't protect him here, but he aches for them, even so.

He aches, and aches, and aches.

As the elevator slows, he stands, bracing himself for the next level of hell.

. o .

The Speed Force delivers.

He wishes it would show itself, but it hides in shadows, and titanium, and Ronnie's drawling, unfamiliar tone. It does not seek to comfort or reassure, to make him feel welcome. It seeks to impress a message: the living don't belong here.

He tells Ronnie what he couldn't tell Eddie. "I'm here to take Wally's place."

Ronnie's expression darkens. It's the last warning he gets before the Speed Force arrives.

. o .

The Black Flash, as it's known, historically has a beautiful record.

It never misses a kill.

. o .

Barry wheezes for breath, scrabbling at the iron hand locked around his throat.

He can feel The Black Flash feeding, devouring him, his heartbeats and breaths and existentialities fading as it drags them out of him. To an indifferent Ronnie, he pleads; to an unstoppable Black Flash, he pushes back.

Because he is The Living, the one who does not belong here, and so he must fight for himself, or die with them.

. o .

With his dying breath, he rasps, "I love you, Iris."

. o .

The plan – the plan which did not deserve to be recognized as something strategic or to indicate that he knew what he was doing – leaves him weak and sick, struggling on.

He holds a hand tightly to his own chest, standing inside the elevator on legs that are failing. Humans don't belong in the Speed Force, he knows. Humans can't survive about 24,000 feet for extended periods of time. There is nothing here, no arbitrary truths to base his judgments upon, no ways for his body to cope. Speed Force is the greatest illusion his mind, his struggling, ailing, failing mind can contrive. It presses upon him as shadows and ghosts and intense, unnamable emotions, because it possesses no objective forms with which to speak.

The truth is jarring: though it is infinite, the Speed Force is, chillingly, overwhelmingly, utterly empty.

Barry closes his eyes and finds no rest, and wonders why it chose him.

. o .

Because, it says without saying, We Need Each Other.

. o .

Snart hammers the message home. How badly do you want to die, Barry? he sneers.

I don't, Barry can't reply, because he is straining for breath, and he has no way home, and he is going to die here.

He came to be slaughtered, but he knew – and Speed Force knew, too – that he was too human to go gently.

When the last urge to fight disappears, the Speed Force through Snart levels the cold gun and blasts him off his feet.

It is worse than he remembered.

. o .

The edges of Barry's visions are gray with pain and exhaustion, a shock like a smoky corridor pressing in on him. He is dimly aware of Jay Garrick setting him free from his ice hold. For a moment his heart leaps, because the Speed Force he knows is kind, the Speed Force he knows cares, and this is the Speed Force he needed all along.

But – and it hurts – this isn't the Speed Force.

The Speed Force keeps its gun aimed at them and fires at Jay.

Barry doesn't think, just lunges forward and brings up Jay's helmet, diverting the blast back towards Snart. He has to strain to hold himself upright, each step more painful than the last. Inside the room, Wally stands, catatonic and listless, tears in his eyes, arms folded with monasterial anguish across his chest.

Mom, he pleads, his Speed signature like thorns, stabbing Barry as he nears, relentless, undeterrable. Mom.

"Wally?" Barry says, scarcely daring to hope.

It takes another try, and then Wally looks at him, confusion and grief written profoundly in his features. "Barry?"

Relief hits Barry like a wave, almost knocking him over. "Let's get you home," Barry says. Let's go home.

For a moment, he almost thinks he can win, a total, unconditional victory. I passed your tests, he tells the Speed Force, which assesses, and waits, and does not arrive at judgment. I'm taking him home.

Then Jay says he has to say and Barry's heart plunges.

No, no, no, Dad, no, Dad, please—

He has to divorce the two, but his head is splitting open and the pain in his shoulder scarcely rivals the pain in his chest at the thought of leaving Jay behind. There's another way, there's another way, there has to be—

. o .

There isn't.

. o .

Getting home is like drowning.

Except this time, he can't breathe in the air, the overwhelming sense of being alive in a world where everything is. He can't process the fact that he is alive and Wally is, too. On his knees, he heaves for breath, and tries to speak for them in a manner that is calm and rational when nothing about his reality is.

He slips away when he can and does not run, embracing the utter, obliviating detachment he feels from the Speed Force.

. o .

I should have stayed, he thinks, as he looks at Iris, at the undamaged lives he is bringing too close to him, and anguishes.

I should have stayed for them.

Instead, he comes home, and he says he needs time, and doesn't know if he needs space or spacelessness, if he seeks closeness or distance, if he needs or can't need.

He doesn't go to Cisco's first. He walks outside city limits, legs trembling, breath arriving in arresting, halting gasps. His shoulder aches fiendishly. His mouth is dry and hurting, the simple act of speaking unbearable. His mind feels crushed, tin-can-in-a-compressor, and he sinks to the grass and tries to hold onto the Earth so the lightning won't take him.

. o .

Rise.

Barry blinks, and an array of spindly, out-of-focus stalks sways before him. He does not move, doesn't speak, doesn't say, Speed-grass is soft.

Rise.

With exhausted quiescence, he does. To his knees. And then he pauses, too tired to go on, and The Black Flash walks towards him and he thinks, Take me home.

Resting a clawed hand on his broken shoulder, The Black Flash does not speak. It does not crush or break or shatter that which would yield so readily under its hand. Perhaps most arrestingly, it breathes, slow and deep, like it's resting. Like it's tired, too.

Barry reaches up and rests a hand over its, and for the first time, he feels a strange, unbearable emotion, an echo of hurting, an echo of pain that is his own, and a sudden, overwhelming sense of apology.

Wrong.

It thunders deep in his soul, an apology he cannot hear but still recognizes, and he looks up at The Black Flash and knows it isn't criticizing him.

With a squeeze that is almost gentle, The Black Flash lets him go and disappears.

Barry opens his eyes and feels a hand on his shoulder, groaning softly at the pain, entreating the Speed Force because oh-oh-oh I am human I am human, but it's not the Speed Force. It's Jesse. "What're you doing out here?" she asks, and she's right, it's cold, he should – he's too exhausted to put out enough heat to keep himself warm, losing it, surrendering it hypothermically to his surroundings. She picks up his numb, half-frozen hand and squeezes it. "C'mon, let's go. Let's – " She lifts him effortlessly, and Barry closes his eyes once more and they're gone.

. o .

He can feel a wolf beside him, a big, heavy, warm, soft, breathing presence.

It doesn't speak and he doesn't need it to. Curling a hand in the Speed Force's fur, he feels its muzzle press against his side, and he wonders, and wants to open his eyes, but they are too heavy, and he is too tired.

Together, they sleep.

. o .

When he wakes up on a gurney, whining noiselessly against the pain in his chest, he finds a set of thick, heavy, warm blankets on top of him. No one responds to him, caught up in soft conversation a room over. He reaches out a hand and finds empty sheets.

There is no wolf. He shuts his eyes.

. o .

Even when his eyes are open, he dreams.

Lying on his back, he listens to a Speed-fire crackle nearby, hot enough to make him flush and create the false impression of a fever. Or maybe it's real, because the fire is not but the heat persists in its absence. Caitlin puts an ice pack on his forehead and breaks open a pack of saltines, and he eats them without saying a word about it.

When he hears his mother and father holding conversations, he doesn't join in, tempting though it is.

When Jay, screaming in agony, pleads for him to help, he pushes a pillow over his head and repeats a single mantra: not-real-not-real-not-real-not-real.

It hits too close to home, a detachment from reality that doesn't split between Him and Everything Else, but rather consumes him, too, until he cannot look at Cisco or Caitlin or any of them and understand.

He understands the Speed crocodile that sprawls across his chest with punishing insistence, crushing down his ribcage and rumbling to stir up the aching, scarcely-healing bones. He whimpers and cannot roll out from underneath it, and he has no voice to ask it to stop, so he endures. It is a haze of pain that persists even after the scales pressing into his stomach vanish.

In a delirium, he sees the Speed Force walk into the room, a mirror image of himself, and take a seat in a chair and watch him for a time. No one else notices his golden-eyed doppelganger, or how lifeless he seems by comparison. Or maybe they do, because Caitlin gets him on a second IV in an increasingly anxious effort to restore his good health.

Wally is MIA, and Barry wants to check on him, but there's a Speed-storm outside, a low, warning crackle of thunder that keeps him from opening the window. He catches snatches of conversations, their tone reassuring, but the language is beyond him and the Wolf and the Crocodile.

He buries his face gratefully into the Speed-Wolf's nape when it curls up on his chest, still too heavy, but healing, too.

You're Breakable, the Speed Force reflects, and Barry squeezes the scruff of its neck apologetically.

. o .

On the fourth day, The Black Flash returns, and rests its hand on his shoulder, and Barry exhales because it would be so easy to join it.

But he reaches up and squeezes The Black Flash's hand, a silent rejection, and The Black Flash does not take him with it.

He's already home.

. o .

On the fifth, the fever breaks. The team exhales.

Barry apologizes in a voice that is sandpaper thin for crimes that aren't his. Caitlin and Cisco brush him off; Jesse hugs him even though it hurts; and Joe and Iris both spend hours at a time at his bedside, asleep or awake. HR brings coffee and stories that Barry falls asleep in the middle of, his enthusiasm such that he's still talking with gusto when Barry returns. Even Julian chips in a sincere, "Feel better, mate," that prompts Barry to expend a few hours' worth of strength on a slight nod.

Wally, though, Wally stays away, and Barry aches to find him.

. o .

On the fifth day, his opportunity arises.

He finds Wally, and he barely has the strength to stand, but he hobbles towards him and hugs him, trying to impress the Wolf's stability, the Crocodile's strength, and above all else the forgiving Flash that follows and wanders and nears, an ebb-and-flow he may never fully understand but will strive to, regardless.

And he feels Wally's shoulders relax, his grip absolutely crushing on Barry's shoulder, and it hurts, but Barry doesn't let go.

Some things are worth suffering for.